


A Cold Cup of Tea

by downdeepinside



Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: Angst, Depression, Drugs, Grief/Mourning, Mental Instability, Suicide, grim, suicide ideation
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-02-10
Updated: 2015-02-10
Packaged: 2018-03-11 13:55:54
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,283
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3328841
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/downdeepinside/pseuds/downdeepinside
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Sherlock might be broken, but it's nothing a cup of tea can't fix. At least, according to John's mother.</p>
            </blockquote>





	A Cold Cup of Tea

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you to the two sporadic comments that recently made me remember I was once able to write. I'm sorry this is so grim but that's how I'm feeling at the moment. 
> 
> Please be advised there are dark themes in this story.
> 
> Finally, I don't wish to read this again right now. However, I will check for obvious typos in the morning. Or in a few weeks. I'm unreliable, sorry.

The first thing he’s aware of is a burning sensation spreading from the heel of his hand to the tips of his fingers. The next is a gentle drift of steam making his eyes sting before, finally, he inhales the scent of bitter-sweet tea.

He takes a sip but it’s too hot, too soon, and he curses as he drops the mug. His tongue immediately darts out to wet the sore spot on his lip. There’s a voice, a word, his name, and he turns to the doorway behind him and frowns at the man frowning back at him. John, some distant part of his mind palace echoes. It’s John.

“Sorry,” he says reflexively, although not entirely sure what he’s sorry for.  The man watching him shakes his head and frowns some more before saying something, something Sherlock doesn’t hear. Sherlock turns back to his tea, noting a small puddle forming around the base where he dropped the mug a little too quickly. The man speaks again, but Sherlock’s too busy focusing on the tea. Where did the tea come from? How didn’t he notice? Why does it even matter?

When Sherlock looks up again the doorway is empty, and his tea is cold. He feels a little like he’s falling and he groans. Falling. Why is he always falling?

When night falls and Londoners all around him curl up in their silly little beds in their silly little homes, he pours the tea down the sink. He feels bad, but that’s ridiculous. People don’t feel bad for liquids. Normal people don’t watch the sink suck down the pale brown liquid like it’s something spectacular. Normal people don’t empathise with a cold cup of tea.

He sighs, for what is probably the hundredth time today, and heads towards his bedroom. He doesn’t bother changing into night clothes, just as he never bothered changing out of the last pair that morning.

***

_I suppose it’s all I really know, tea. Whenever I was upset as a child my mum would always offer me tea, even when I was probably too young to really be drinking the stuff. It got to the point where I wasn’t even sure if I was upset, or just fancied a cuppa and a quiet moment to myself. He seems a little like I did, back then. He looks so lost, so much of the time. His eyes are glazed and blood-shot, like he’s been crying for years and doesn’t even know._

***

Somehow, they’ve ended up in Speedy’s, and as soon as Sherlock noticed he wants to leave but something in John’s expression, something about the pinched lines around his lips and dark circles under his eyes, stops him. There’s a cup of tea in front of him, he notices, and he wraps his fingers around the warm Styrofoam cup.

John makes no effort to talk, which he appreciates, and they sit in what Sherlock assumes is the infamous ‘comfortable silence’ for almost an entire hour. Eventually John has finished his full-English, and drawn out drinking his glass of water as long as humanly possible. He puts the glass down with a resigned breath of defeat and apparently forces his eyes to meet Sherlock’s. The detective tries not to flinch away.

“I need to go back to work, Sherlock,” he says, and Sherlock wonders how this is of any interest to him. “But I don’t want you to feel like I’m abandoning you. Please don’t feel that way.”

Sherlock marvels at how John believes he can simply ask him what to feel. He also marvels at how John’s eyes seem so sincere, despite evidence the detective has stored that John doesn’t believe him to be human at all. Sherlock’s a machine, isn’t he? He can’t feel abandoned, he can’t feel anything. Isn’t that right? John? Sherlock wants to ask, wants to say ‘not good’, but he doesn’t. Instead he takes a small sip of his tea only to find its cold again. Disappointing.

“It’ll only be a few hours to start; I’ve got a shift two till five on Monday. We can build up from there, if that’s what you want. Sherlock? Is that what you want?”

We? Sherlock isn’t sure what he wants, but he’s also fairly sure John and he haven’t been a ‘we’ in years. What John does or doesn’t do is none of his business, isn’t that right? He wants to stand up, say that what he _wants_ is to be anywhere other than this sad little café on this sad little street. Perhaps, in fact, he does, because John looks a little more broken than before the next time Sherlock looks away from the too-milky cup of tea.

The man opposite Sherlock nods and says something else, but like before its white noise. Eventually Sherlock finds himself alone in his dark bedroom, and he regrets ever changing into the God-awful suit like John suggested.

***

_It’s so rare that he’ll look me in the eye these days, and even rarer that he’ll actually open his mouth up to say a word. I wish I could say I treasure every word, but I can’t. Not when every word looks like it left his mouth unbidden. Everything he does these days seems to be him running on default. The other day I took him out for breakfast and I don’t think he even knew where we were half of the time, just stared blankly at his God-damned cup of tea and looked for all the world like a kicked-puppy._

_I need to move on, I know that. It’s not just him that’s hurting now, not after so many months. It’s just- hard. I guess._

***

He spends so much time wandering the rooms of his mind palace these days, opening doors on the past and sealing windows to ward off the present, to the point where he struggles to tell fact from fiction. He always used to know the difference between the real world and the one inside his mind, but today they both seem equally fragile and hard to reach.

At the far end of a tattered corridor there’s a steaming cup of tea, sat on a table next to a broken toy soldier. The soldier’s head hangs low and his rifle is discarded on the floor, magazine hanging loose and clearly empty. He looks hopeless. The tea looks inviting.

Sherlock makes his way delicately to the tea and tries to pick up the soft blue mug, growling in irritation when his hands shake and his vision loses focus. He can’t reach the mug.

“Sherlock?”

The porcelain cracks before his very eyes and before he knows it tea is spilling out everywhere, more tea than should have really been able to fit inside one small mug. Gallons of tea, he realises absently as the corridor starts to flood with the lukewarm liquid and he distantly recalls a book he read as a child on the anatomy of a butterfly. Ah, butterfly stroke. Swimming, yes, that would be a good idea.

His face is cold and the soldier lifts from the floor, floating on an ocean of earl grey.  

“Oh, Sherlock. Please. It’s alright. Please don’t do that.”

Light starts to seep in through the wide windows near the ceiling of his palace and as Sherlock comes back to reality, finding himself sat up in bed with his very own soldier wrapped tightly around his abdomen, he wonders how he’ll ever distinguish fact from fiction again.

***

_He cries in the night. Horrific sobs that I feel like punches to the gut. I always go to him, of course I do, and I don’t think he really notices I’m there so I just follow my instinct. It helps me, at least._

_One night he woke up screaming, but his eyes were still as glazed as ever. I held his hand and he gripped mine back, tight enough to leave light bruises, and when he stopped trembling quite so terribly I started talking. About everything and anything. I told him stories from my childhood, told him about the cups of tea I make him, about how I love him. All of it._

_I apologised, too. I said I was sorry until my throat was sore and his eyes had fallen shut again._

***

There’s a notebook full of illegible scribbles that must be his own, which he thinks is strange since he doesn’t remember writing anything about different types of tea. Doesn’t even remember conducting the study.

He takes a small sip from the mug sitting by his notebook and frowns. It’s disgusting.

St John’s Wort, he reads, is believed by some to be a cure for depression.

So is death, he imagines, but it still doesn’t seem worth it. He considers dropping the tea in the sink with all the others cups, but decides against it when he reads the name again.

It’s John’s tea, in a roundabout way.

He downs the mug in one.

***

_I’m starting to doubt he’ll ever come back to me. He’s been like this before, of course. He even warned me about it the day we met._

_But this is something different, something more permanent. I don’t think it’s going to be cured with a good case, or an experiment, or even a cup of tea as mum always suggested._

_I think this time I’ve really lost him._

***

A cup of tea, and a vial of cocaine. He’d never injected before, always felt the loss of his cartilage would be a fair trade for a decent high. Now, though, he’s seeking something more than a high. Now he has no desire to feel more alive, to have his senses heightened.

Death sounds fantastic.

It sounds like the shriek of a lorry’s braking system struggling to stop the vehicle as it travels at 120mph on a dark road in the middle of the night, loud and final. It sounds like the first and last firework on November the 5th, shocking but exhilarating. It sounds like the penultimate note of Fur Elise, lingering yet not unwelcome.

It sounds like the end of everything, and in the middle of the night on a day Sherlock can’t identify that sounds just right. Before, he never knew the day but he knew why he was alive. During, he hadn’t known why he was alive but that hadn’t mattered so long as the days kept on ticking by in a reliable order. After, now, today, he doesn’t know the day. He doesn’t know why he’s alive. He doesn’t know anything.

He’s not even sure about this. His final decision. He isn’t even sure about _this_.

The cup of tea is a reminder he decides to ignore. He ignores the invisible toy soldier watching him from the corner, and he ignores the post-it on the fridge that tells him John will be back by dinner time. He ignores all of it because he never needed distractions.

He never needed bloody distractions.

***

_I’m just waiting for the day he talks again. That’s all I need, I think. I need him to look me in the eye and say… something. Anything, really. I just need him to look at me like he’s at least half on the planet and speak like it’s something he fully intended to do._

_I need the old Sherlock back. Because I’m not strong enough. He might think I am, but he’s wrong._

_He trusted me and he was wrong to._

***

He struggles to tell fact from fiction after, now. Because of this he barely bats and eyelid when the vial of cocaine is swallowed up by the table and the post-it note falls to the floor only to start yelling at him. He considers yelling back, but thinks that might be the nail in the coffin that holds what is left of his dwindling sanity.

The lorry drivers hits his break but it’s too late, Sherlock is already lying on the floor smiling as his broken back screams out in agony. A pool of blood starts to drown him just as the tea had, during, and his lungs start to fill. It won’t be long now.

The door slams, another opens. He sighs. Now even the past is lying.

The fireworks display beings and everyone gasps, oohing and aahing loudly in Sherlock’s head. The colours are blinding but Sherlock doesn’t mind, he supposes he won’t need his sight where he’s going anyway. The last firework leaves behind a puff of smoke and the scent of burning. Sherlock supposes it shouldn’t smell like burning flesh. He supposes normal people don’t know what that smells like anyway.

Next a small boy is grinning lopsidedly as he sits, cross-legged, at a piano. His fifth finger hits a high E and Sherlock groans. Does this metaphor even make sense? 

He supposes not because light filters into the music room of his palace and a broken soldier, a real one this time, watches him with tired concern in his eyes. Tired concern. Like it’s been used up, or used too much lately.

Sherlock sees cocaine, and a lorry, and falling, and he frowns.

He doesn’t want that. At least, he doesn’t think he does. That will have to do for now.

“John,” he says delicately, the way one might speak if the walls were made of tea-stained paper. He finds John’s eyes and it hurts, like looking into the sun. “John,” he repeats, and it hurts but it’s good. It’s warm.

“John,” he says for a third time, as if it’s all he can say. The subject of his desperate gaze smiles and drops to his knees.

“I’m here, Sherlock.” The soldier says, “I’m here.”

**Author's Note:**

> "If you're going through hell, keep going." - Winston Churchill.
> 
> Thank you.


End file.
